Two of Donald Trump’s top White House lawyers are slated to speak with the Jan. 6 select committee Wednesday, according to one person with knowledge of the arrangement.

Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel, and his deputy Patrick Philbin, are expected to speak informally with the panel, a potential precursor to more formal transcribed testimony later. Cipollone and Philbin did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the panel declined to comment.

Cipollone and Philbin are the latest in a string of high-level aides to cooperate with the panel. In recent weeks, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have both answered questions from investigators.

Cipollone emerged as a central source of pushback in the frantic final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency. He reportedly pushed back aggressively against a last-ditch plan to appoint a special prosecutor to examine Trump’s claims of election fraud, and he also appeared to be the subject of a Jan. 5 text from Fox News host Sean Hannity to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Six of the nine Democrats seeking Oregon’s brand new congressional district have found something to agree on: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top congressional Democrats should stay out of the race.

In a surprising development, most of the Democrats in the 6th Congressional District primary denounced what they say is an unprecedented move by a political action committee affiliated with national Democrats, the House Majority PAC. They say the PAC has thrown itself into the highly competitive race by purchasing roughly $1 million of ads to help political newcomer Carrick Flynn.

“We strongly condemn House Majority PAC’s unprecedented and inappropriate decision…” the joint statement said. “We call on House Majority PAC to actually stand by our party’s values and let the voters of Oregon decide who their Democratic nominee will be.”

The candidates who signed the statement were state Reps. Andrea Salinas and Teresa Alonso-Leon, former Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith, engineer Matt West, physician Kathleen Harder and cryptocurrency investor and Army veteran Cody Reynolds. They’re all running for a new U.S. House seat given to Oregon as a result of the 2020 Census.

Yelp announced today that it will now pay travel expenses for employees who need abortion and reproductive care.

Why it matters: The online review site's announcement comes nearly a month after Citigroup announced a similar policy. The company joins a handful of other employers, like Bumble and Match, who have publicly made clear where they stand on the issue of abortion access ahead of an upcoming Supreme Court ruling, which could roll back Roe v. Wade.

“We’ve long been a strong advocate for equality in the workplace and believe that gender equality cannot be achieved if women’s healthcare rights are restricted," said Yelp's chief diversity officer, Miriam Warren, in a statement.

How it works: Yelp said its health insurance already covered abortion care. The new policy will allow employees to bill their health insurer directly for travel costs if they need to leave their state to access care; also allowing for some measure of employee privacy.

The Justice Department this week rebuffed a request from the House Oversight Committee for more details about the 15 boxes of White House records that former president Donald Trump improperly removed to Mar-a-Lago, hinting in a letter that an ongoing investigation prevents the department from doing so.

In the letter addressed to Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), and reviewed by The Washington Post, acting assistant attorney general Peter Hyun writes that after the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) referred “concerns about whether such materials had been properly handled” to the Justice Department earlier this year, officials asked the archives not to share information related to the records taken to Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

The Post reported last week that the Justice Department has begun taking steps to investigate the former president’s removal of the records, some of which were classified and labeled “top secret.” Maloney had accused the department of obstructing her committee’s investigation by preventing NARA’s from handing over a detailed inventory of the boxes’ contents.
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In the letter sent this week, Hyun writes that while the Justice Department has “great respect” for the committee’s oversight authority, “the Department previously asked NARA not to share or otherwise disclose to others information relating to this matter in order to protect the integrity of our ongoing work.”

oin the White House for a virtual convening on equity this Thursday, April 14th as more than 90 federal agencies—including all Cabinet-level agencies—release their first-ever Equity Action Plans, as called for in President Biden’s historic Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.

WHEN: Thursday April 14th, 10AM ET
WHERE: The summit will stream live on the White House Youtube Channel
RSVP: Kindly RSVP via THIS link to receive program details, materials and viewing instructions

On his first day in office, President Biden signed an Executive Order directing the federal government to advance an ambitious equity and racial justice agenda that matches the scale of the challenges we face and the opportunities before us.

This Thursday, Ambassador Susan Rice, Director of the Domestic Policy Council, Shalanda Young, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and members of President Biden’s Cabinet will lay out concrete strategies and commitments that agencies are releasing to address the systemic barriers in our nation’s policies and programs that hold too many underserved communities back from prosperity, dignity, and equality. National equity leaders will also participate in the convening.

These Equity Action Plans will expand federal investment and support in communities who have been locked out of opportunity for too long, including communities of color, Tribal communities, territorial communities, rural communities, LGBTQI+ communities, disability communities, communities of faith, women and girls, and communities impacted by persistent poverty.

Forget what you heard. The DOJ’s Jan. 6 probe is moving at a good pace.

For months, critics of the Justice Department’s investigation into the events of Jan. 6, 2021, have complained that prosecutors appeared to be focusing only on the rioters at the Capitol and not on higher-level targets. Then this week, we learned that over the past two months prosecutors have issued subpoenas to a number of individuals involved in planning, funding and executing the “Save America” rally, including people close to then-President Donald Trump. The response from the critics has been a mixture of professed relief that something is finally happening and continued complaints that the entire process is still moving too slowly.
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I think these critics continue to have it wrong. All indications are that the Justice Department is pursuing this massive, unprecedented investigation methodically and aggressively. I’d argue that the progress has been impressively fast. And now, a little more than a year into the investigation, things are unfolding at an increasingly rapid clip.

There are hard truths behind the old saying about the wheels of justice grinding slowly. Large criminal investigations such as this involve the painstaking process of gathering massive amounts of evidence, assembling successful cases against lower-level participants, persuading them to cooperate, and using that to build progressively more serious cases against higher-level actors. Many of these steps involve reluctant defendants, defense attorneys, judges and court calendars, and they take time.

All indications are that the Jan. 6 investigation is following this classic “up the ladder” model. Initially, we heard primarily about the prosecutions of hundreds of individual rioters. More recently, larger conspiracy indictments of members of the militia groups the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys brought more serious charges against individuals who played key roles in planning the assault on the Capitol. And now we have news of grand jury subpoenas directed at even higher-level targets, providing additional evidence of the investigative work that is going on out of public view. These are all signs of a large, complex investigation proceeding about as we should expect.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/01/forget-what-you-heard-dojs-jan-6-probe-is-moving-good-pace/